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Essay on Elohim City Terrorist Group
Christian Identity millennialism has a distinctively racist tinge. Members believe that Armageddon will be a race war of "Aryans" against Jews and nonwhites. The "Aryans" are not merely whites of northern and western European descent; they are the real biological Israel, for according to Identity the biblical tribes of Israel migrated in ancient times from the Middle East to Western Europe. The Jews, in their view, have nothing to do with the Israelites. They are instead considered demonic impostors--"Satan's spawn," descended through Cain from a sexual union between Eve and the devil in the Garden, the primal sin.
This strange theology has seeped into virtually every corner of the radical right. It may be found among Klansmen and militia members, survivalists and neo-Nazis. And small wonder. Identity provides the perfect religious frame for the far right's political agenda. Every purported conspiracy and cabal, whether of international bankers, Trilateralists or the UN, can be brought within Identity's "great conspiracy"--Satan's plot to take over the world and deprive "Aryans" of their birthright, a plot that Identity believes began in the Garden of Eden and will end only at Armageddon. Plot can be nested in plot, in an ascending pyramid of conspiracies that ends with the devil himself.
Identity also gives believers the assurance that they constitute a divine warrior elite, the only ones vouchsafed true knowledge of history. This sense of divine assurance compensates for Identity's inability to create a mass base for itself. No on knows precisely how many Identity believers there are--the movement is broken up into dozens, perhaps hundreds, of churches and Bible study groups--any more than the overall size of the radical right can be known. It is estimated that the hard-core radical right numbers 100-200,000, of whom perhaps 20-30,000 are committed Identity believers......
